Please don't use URL shorteners here on HN. They break many of the underpinnings of the www and hypermedia, and deprive users of important context (will it take me to goatse or malware? will I be rickrolled?).
Particularly given that HN has built into it both community convention (use the [1], [2], [n] as footnote placeholders for a link, and, the site itself, is pretty good about abbreviating the "In-Situ" display to reduce visual link clutter (Mouse over gives you the full link for review)
I find that difficult to credit - I don't have any insider info., but that's not how Apple goes, for the most part. Also, if they were doing a total rewrite (as they did with FCP or iMovie) I would expect the outcome to be much more different from iTunes 10 than 11 is.
No question good work was done. But I imagine a complete rewrite would involve say non-modal preference dialogs just to pick a long-running irritation out of a hat.
Seconded. The preferences dialog appears to be completely unchanged from iTunes 10.
What's especially irritating about this is that modal preferences dialogs with 'Ok'/'Cancel' buttons have been discouraged since, as far as I'm aware, the 10.0 HIG.
> What's especially irritating about this is that modal preferences dialogs with 'Ok'/'Cancel' buttons have been discouraged since, as far as I'm aware, the 10.0 HIG.
I doubt it's a clean break. Exhibit A: Just as in iTunes 10, entering manual music selection for an iPod Shuffle craps out the same 3 giant scrolling subviews in an L shape: http://i.imgur.com/CsXud.png
I do like the new dynamic background and highlight colours when selecting albums and tracks in the Album view.
It blocks the UI thread when generating thumbnails in the "video" tab... lots of small modal progress windows... really still feels like an OS 9 app at times.
It does seem like they removed the ability to open multiple windows though, which I always activated by mistake instead of on purpose.
At least the preferences dialog is the exact same modal crap it always was (What are they thinking?) and the metadata dialog is also unchanged since forever.
Looks like a coat of paint, nothing more. They are always so tantalizingly close to radically rethink everything. But they don’t seem to dare, and that’s sad.
New version seems faster in some respects, but at least ridiculously slow in another: searching with the Column Browser open.
I have a huge library--~63000 songs; I'm a musician--and although iTunes 10.7 search was quite reasonable, the new iTunes takes several seconds to do anything after typing a query. Even if I turn off "Search Entire Library" (so that it only searches the active screen, like Music) it is incredibly unresponsive. I'm talking ~6 seconds for the UI to update and the program to become responsive again. If I limit the search to only one field (e.g., Composer) it is faster, but still substantially slower than iTunes 10.7 (~2 seconds for the UI to update, compared to the previous results of nearly instant), and it makes the search much less useful.
Closing the Column Browser speeds up filtering, though it's still slower than 10.7.
Possibly... though Activity Monitor (or top) doesn't show anything suspicious. If I stop audio from playing, iTunes drops to about 4% CPU. (And mdworker doesn't appear to be working overtime either.) With the Column Browser open, searching in iTunes causes a leap to 100% CPU until the UI updates. Column Browser closed, searching causes a momentary leap, but not to 100%, and obviously it's over very quickly.
There's clearly something up with the coding of the Column Browser.
It works well for me on Windows but there are no significant performance improvements. Design is no doubt better.
I still wonder why Apple doesn't use their $100 billion to get some A-grade software engineers. Steve Jobs used to boast about A-level players and all that. But current mess that iTunes is can't be from A-level players.
And don't even get me started on Safari for Windows. Apple just seems to have dropped ball completely on it!
I wonder who you think works on clang/llvm (or CoreAudio, or xnu, or Quicktime)? People who can't get jobs writing Rails models for consumer web startups?
In fairness, though, the iTunes client team is a lot smaller than most people probably realize. Problems with the software are almost certainly the fault of management trying to do more with less, and not the competence (in my experience, extremely high) of the individual devs.
The point was that a lot of Apple customers and iTunes is only Apple software they use(Windows). If it is so bad, it does not make a good impression. A company can't go around saying that they put best devs and people on work with this bad software around!
Granted, iTunes 11 is an improvement but it's still not very different from iTunes 10!
Apple did drop the ball on it... they said they are no longer going to do any development work on it. It's just as well, if you want a good browser on Windows you should be using Chrome or Firefox anyway.
I have been using Chrome for long. I went to Safari because it had a better fullscreen mode. Chrome has this strange mode where not even omnibar is shown. How in the world am I supposed to go to a different site there?
I have to take that back. The mini player considers "space" the same as "enter" and just hits whatever has focus at the moment. Also, it tends to select "back" if you refocus.
Looks a lot like iTunes 10. And … the bug I opened in 2008 is still there! Sweet. Sort your library by Album/Year, and then reverse direction (year descending.) Reverses album order. E_WONTFIX.
There's no sidebar for quick access to things, you have to click album art to select a song, etc. It's a very large UI departure. You can return it to more normal though by viewing by "song" and then selecting View > Show Sidebar.
It hasn't added any useful metadata features. It doesn't appear to cache the downsampled synced versions of music. The default view is different, but it's trivial to get back to the well understood two/three pane layout. There's more iCloud stuff. The "Up Next" feature is pretty nice.
A lot of visual as well as functional features has been added (see http://www.apple.com/itunes/whats-new/). And the iTunes store has been redesigned as well.
Hmm. As far as I can tell, not much about iTunes Match has been updated. It's been available since iOS 5 (and whatever the corresponding iTunes update was -- 10.x?)
Haven't downloaded yet, but apparently they use Helvetica Neue Light for some interface elements now. Perhaps you don't have that installed and it's defaulting to Bold?
I've been waiting for "Up Next" Since I migrated from Winamp - Being able to play a song, and then realize "I know what would go PERFECTLY after this", is very useful.
Or listening to music, selecting a much of tracks, and throwing them in the queue, without the hassle of creating a playlist ahead of time.
That reminds me just how awful iTunes is. About a year ago, I switched to RDio/Spotify and I have not looked back. I do not have any local mp3s any more. Just some flacs for audio testing purposes.
I use iTunes to play my collection of lossless audio (downloaded as FLAC, converted to ALAC in m4a containers). I also like to DJ occasionally, or send albums to friends. Spotify allows for none of that, and has no lossless playback options.
I'm not down on Spotify - I am a customer, as well. But don't pose it as the solution to actually possessing a music library. If all you do is listen to your music on earbuds, it's just fine. The moment you want to do more with it, you're stuck.
I look forward to checking this out though I find that with Spotify/Pandora, iCloud iOS backups, and the Podcast app on my iOS devices, I open up iTunes less and less these days. It's not even on my dock anymore.
The new UI is quite nice, although its striking similarity to Sonora's design leaves me with quite a bitter aftertaste. Unfortunately there seem to be no substantial improvements over metadata and format handling; it looks like I will keep missing foobar2k for a long time still.
I still can't authorize more than 5 computers. Yes, 5 computers is a lot, but if you home/work computers for a couple with a shared account/library and a family room iMac, that's it.
